What is the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB)?

The base addresses of the last few referenced pages is maintained in registers in a cached system called the TLB that aids in faster look-up. It contains those page-table entries that have been most recently used. Normally, each virtual memory reference causes 2 physical memory accesses- one to fetch appropriate page-table entry, and one to fetch the desired data. Using TLB in-between, this is reduced to just one physical memory access in cases of TLB-hit.